I used to worry about the "Under Construction" disclaimer that I had when I started this, and then never seemed to be able to remove, until I suddenly realized that sites should always be under construction, and when they are not they are as dead as Latin was after those Renaissance poopheads had finished with it! Anyway...

This site is a repository of the texts of my essays together with some readings of them and a collection of various examples of photos and artwork (and probably other stuff too, if I could only remember what on earth it was).

The essays were broadcast by WXXI 91.5 Classical of Rochester, NY on Salmagundy each Saturday at 9:35am Eastern Time, from the beginning of time (1985) till May 2009 when Entropa (evil Goddess of Change-for-the-Worse-or-Possibly-the-Worst) troubled the minds of the WXXIites and they retired Simon and Salmagundy, and Rochester went into a terminal decline---for ever. But I do continue on that brilliant bastion of all that's good and kultured, WCLV's syndicated Weekend Radio on many (mainly NPRish) stations traditionally on the first and third weekends of the month, though your weekendage may vary, (these are archived for a couple of months).

I was born on a mountaintop in Tennessee... wait a minute, no that was Davy Crockett! Um... Let's start again.

Um... Few people notice that I'm English but in fact I am. Indeed I was born in the smallish town of Beccles (almost as far to the East in Britain as you can go without getting your feet wet) when it still was a smallish town and while we still had an Empire. Yes, I basked a mere one hundred and ten miles from the very Heart of Empire for the first glorious four months of my life, after which time I noticed that they had actually swapped India for me and, sadly, the next mumblety-mumble years have been one continuous post-imperial depression. At university I studied philosophy and physics and so, quite naturally, became a photographer and graphic designer. In due course (which turned out to be at the rear-end of the seventies) a client sent me over to photograph a boat factory in Miami and I then spent some time visiting and exploring. Having but a flimsy and merely superficially intellectual grasp of the difference in scale between America and Britain I ended up in Rochester, NY in January, not expecting the weather to be noticeably different from Miami in September. A similar cultural discontinuum led me to interpret an invitation to dinner at a home "a short distance" from where I was staying in such a way that, on the coldest night of that winter, I walked the five miles. When my brain finally thawed out I discovered to my surprise that I had met a very nice lady called Ann. And, even more surprisingly, had married her. Sadly our marriage only lasted for twenty-one years and five children, but in the meantime it did lead me to switch my occupation, via a stint teaching at first children and then real people, to computer programming (which actually turned out to be what I had trained for---but who knew?) This in its turn has led me to Texas. I spend as much of my time as I can wrest from running an unrelenting, unpaid and unwilling taxi service for sojourning children, playing mediæval music, reading obscure books and trying with pathetically veiled desperation to write essays. I do not go south for the winter. What would be the point?

By the way I'm not very good at writing Bios---always seems to end in fiasco, or as in this case start with a fiasco too: Oh yes! And for those comparison shoppers out there here is another opinion.